As use requirements become increasingly strict, heat dissipation of a chip with high power consumption, and energy conservation and emission reduction gradually become a principal contradiction faced by next generation information and communications technology (ICT) convergence. Liquid cooling, as an efficient heat dissipation solution, has been widely applied to fields, such as the defense industry, medical treatment, and mainframe computers. That a liquid cooling technology is introduced into a data center and directly acts on a heat source in a primary device is currently an efficient and feasible heat dissipation solution, and has a broad application prospect.
In a typical liquid cooling system loop of an existing data center, a device cooling system is configured to transfer heat from a central processing unit (CPU), a memory, a power supply, and the like to a heat exchanger, and implement heat exchange with an upper-level cooling system. Even though the device cooling system is closely coupled to a rack and a primary device, pipeline layout occupies internal space of the rack, bringing many difficulties to rack design, device cabling, and installation and maintenance.
In addition, the current data center generally uses an International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 600 wide standard rack, and a conventional pipeline layout solution of a device cooling system includes the following two solutions. First, a flow allocation unit is securely installed on the right side of a cabinet, and is located in front of a mounting bar, a quick connector is fixed on a node panel, a hose is connected to the quick connector and the flow allocation unit, and cabling is performed on the left side of the cabinet. Second, a flow allocation unit is securely installed on two internal sides of a column of a front door of a cabinet, a quick connector is installed on the flow allocation unit, and some cabling space is occupied. Advantages of the foregoing two solutions are a small change of a rack structure and good rack universality. However, there are also obvious limitations. In the first solution, space from a front panel to the door of the cabinet needs to be occupied, and space in a cabinet width direction is occupied, which limits the width of a subrack and leads to low space utilization. In the second solution, space from the front panel to the door of the cabinet needs to be occupied, which easily affects closing of the cabinet, and is not suitable for a front-access-cabled device with a large amount of front cabling, and moreover, cabling is performed together on cables and water pipes, leading to a large risk.